skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Strictly speaking, no. It's primarily developed (as I understand it) for cases (gaming, mostly, but some hobby/dev use) where emulating hardware accurately (think timings) is desireable.

In a sense it's also a history preservation project, though I doubt they would characterize it as such themselves. They don't do the documentation that pcjs does; but I think it's similar in spirit, if not in implementation specifics.
A big problem is that where we have a good solution you'll lose if you insist on that solution but other people get away with doing something that's crap but customers like better. We often have to mandate a poor solution that will be tolerated because if we mandate the better solution it will be rejected, and if we don't mandate anything the outcomes are far worse.

Today for example I changed energy company†. I made a telephone call, from a number the company has never seen before. I told them my name (truthfully but I could have lied) and address (likewise). I agreed to about five minutes of parameters, conditions, etc. and I made one actual meaningful choice (a specific tariff, they offer two). I then provided 12 digits identifying a bank account (they will eventually check this account exists and ask it to pay them money, which by default will just work) and I'm done.

Notice that anybody could call from a burner and that would work too. They could move Aunt Sarah's energy to some random outfit, assign payments to Jim's bank account, and cause maybe an hour of stress and confusion for both Sarah and Jim when months or years later they realise the problem.

We know how to do this properly, but it would be high friction and that's not in the interests of either the "energy companies" or the politicians who created this needlessly complicated "Free Market" for energy. We could abolish that Free Market, but again that's not in their interests. So, we're stuck with this waste of our time and money, indefinitely.

There have been simpler versions of this system, which had even worse outcomes. They're clumsier to use, they cause more people to get scammed AND they result in higher cost to consumers, so that's not great. And there are better systems we can't deploy because in practice too few consumers will use them, so you'd have 0% failure but lower total engagement and that's what matters.

† They don't actually supply either gas or electricity, that's a last mile problem solved by a regulated monopoly, nor do they make electricity or drill for gas - but they do bill me for the gas and electricity I use - they're an artefact of Capitalism.
> Weird returning to Firefox, but I did and there is nothing in chrome I miss.

Never left Firefox, never had much of a reason. The Node.js debugger integration stuff brings me to Chrome every once in a while but I don't use for my daily browsing.
CloudFlare offers it. Even if it's not used for blocking it might be used for analytics or threat calculations, so you might get hit later.
Whoa there, citation? A "lot of"?
FTA

> Meanwhile, Walgreens is also having a tough time. The pharmacy giant said in October it would close roughly 1,200 U.S. stores over the next three years, including 500 locations in fiscal 2025. In June, it said about 8,600 locations would be shuttered over the next few years.
We cannot really list them, as 90% of the time, it's not the websites themselves, it's their WAF. And there is a trend toward most company websites to be behind a WAF nowadays to avoid 1) annoying regulations (US companies putting geoloc on their websites to avoid EU cookie regulations) and 2) DDoS.

It's now pretty common to have cloudflare, AWS, etc WAFs as main endpoints, and these do anti bots (TLS fingerprinting, header fingerprinting, Javascript checks, capt has, etc).
You can’t separate the services problem from the housing problem. These tiny houses need additional services for bathrooms showers and food nearby and for that you be viable you need 25-50 units near each other.
> Siri is proprietary, closed source, big corp, etc.

Yes, and because of that, it's the only voice assistant I want. I do not want a hyper-intelligent "friend that knows everything about me" because that, without fail, is being sold to me by companies who will need access to every last bit of data about me and my life, who will then host that data somewhere, with some level of security, which I'm not involved in and do not control. And tbh, given my thoughts about how users approach tech, I don't want that for other people either.

Putting aside my feelings about surveillance capitalism and how inherently exploitative and inhumane it is, with full knowledge that all my objections under that umbrella already, for me, constitute a wide and thoroughly researched opinion as to why this shit is horrific for privacy on it's face, but putting it aside:

If companies want access to every last drop of information, every last data point, even assuming an altruistic "we just want to make the best AI assistant we can" against all evidence to the contrary: then there needs to be set, and severe consequences for data breaches for these companies. No more of this "we put up a blog post about it and security researchers got an interview with CNN" no, fuck that shit. If Meta has a breach in it's AI product and as a result of that, whatever hacker org gets the full spread on let's say 5,000 individuals? Then those 5,000 individuals need to be entitled to damages. Firstly anything that impacts their lives needs to be unwound completely; new SSN, any money taken restored, help moving if required, whatever. Secondly they need to be compensated for the emotional toil of spending weeks or months sifting paperwork, sending letters, attending court dates to unwind whatever is done with their identity, and Meta is responsible for ALL of that.

If these companies want effectively root access to my life to provide these services, then I don't think it's unreasonable to say they need to be legally and financially responsible if their negligence causes people to get exposed. And if they're not prepared to take on that liability, then perhaps an AI assistant that knows everything about you is just a product that cannot be made.

I don't think this is an unreasonable view.
If they ignore robots.txt there should be some kind of recourse :(
I can tell you about my experience with blocking traffic from scalpers bots that were very active during pandemic.

All requests produced by those bots were valid ones, nothing that could be flagged by tools like fail2ban etc (my assumption is that it would be the same for financial systems).

Any blocking or rate limiting by IP is useless, we saw about 2-3 requests per minute per IP, and those actors had access to ridiculous number of large CIDRs, blocking any IP caused it instantly replace it with another.

blocking by AS number was also mixed bag, as this list growed up really quickly, most of that were registered to suspicious looking Gmail addresses. (I feel that such activity might own significant percentage of total ipv4 space)

This was basically cat and mouse game of finding some specific characteristic in requests that matches all that traffic and filtering it, but the other side would adapt next day or on Sunday.

aggregated amount of traffic was in range of 2-20k r/s to basically heaviest endpoint in the shop, with was the main reason we needed to block that traffic (it generated 20-40x load of organic traffic)

cloudflare was also not really successful with default configuration, we had to basically challenge everyone by default with whitelist of most common regions from where we expected customers.

So best solution is to track everyone and calculate long term reputation.
Cool! Where could one go to read more about this (specifically Python)?
Not sure if this is new but also notice the keyboard style has changed? Seems more like MacBook style with very low Key Travel ( 1mm ). Sigh I remember Thinkpad and SurfaceBook was the only few sticking to 1.5mm Key Travel.
1) Imagine how biased you are, to throw such ridiculous arguments: China did not invent disposable vapes, those are even banned in their country, it did not invent algorithm-driven video social media and even less fast fashion (Zara was the first huge brand popularizing it, and the clothes were made in Spain).

2) Musk is literally a member of the next cabinet. And you have no clues and are probably delusional if you think Tesla vehicles aren't sharing their data with US agencies. It's obvious this happens.

3) China is not my military rival. Not sure why do you believe that, unless you live in the strange american exceptionalism where US has to be the biggest military dog in the world and if there's another country that could threaten this position it has to be limited.

It has never attacked my country or any of my allies, whereas I can remember many of my allies putting their foot, colonising and fighting China and its neighbours.
Lots of sports have dress codes. Having jeans matching jackets isn't more stupid than let say only "white or blue" gis in Judo, or only-white attire in some tennis tournaments. It's part of the folklore and many people are attached to traditions.

There are also many precedents of athletes challenging the dress-code, I can think of Serena Williams at French Tennis Open.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/16/sport/serena-williams-ico...
I was commenting on how acquisitions happen, not asking to be spammed by an accounting company masquerading as a relevant comment.

I'd suggest deleting it and not continuing this strategy, as I suspect I'm not the only HN reader who will react to your comment by making a mental note that 'Digits' is a company with annoying marketing.
Apple routinely rejects apps that try tactics like this. Otherwise it'd be an easy way around the "Ask App Not To Track" prompt.
Ocaml, F#, Reason, ReScript, Scala? Or any other of the million ML style languages?
Show HN: Spaceport – Low-code tool that executes specs as tests
This is still a proof-of-concept but criticism and comments are very welcome.

I was fed up (and also very inexperienced) writing system and end-to-end tests so I made this. The implementation is a bit convoluted but the basic idea is:

1. An LLM writes the specs based on READMEs, design docs, references, etc.

2. Another LLM turns specs into a Python DSL

3. An interpreter runs the DSL

You may review and edit the outputs of step 1 and 2 in one text file, and fill in necessary info to properly set up the tests (like describing how data should be validated when the data schema is an implementation detail).

Comparison:

- vs. Cucumber/Gherkin - Unlike Cucumber, (ideally) you write minimal code with Spaceport

- vs. Unit/integration tests - This is not a replacement but a complement because unit and integration tests are cumbersome to write in natural language--lots of rigid actions and data schemas
Actually Games Workshop started that, probably just being accelerated by Amazon.
It's a dumb click-bait title (riffing on Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?"), but the actual question presented a bit further down is:

"Moving down the scale through lizards and fish to slugs, similar considerations apply. There does not seem to be much reason to suppose that phenomenology should wink out while a reasonably complex perceptual psychology persists… As we move along the scale from fish and slugs through simple neural networks all the way to thermostats, where should consciousness wink out?"

The author seems to have succeeded in answering her own question (at least in hand-wavy fashion) at the same time as posing it, as well as implicitly defining consciousness. So, yeah, it's not like anything to be a thermostat.
Yes, bluechecks were who they said they were. But just because you were who you said you were did not mean you could get a bluecheck.

Bluecheck -> authentic.
Authentic !> bluecheck.

There was no path for most people almost all of the time to get a bluecheck, and they could be removed for arbitrary reasons having nothing to do with your identity. The "process" consisted of someone at Twitter deciding you were worthy, based on arbitrary criteria including "you're my friend."

> The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks.

Having bad politics doesn't mean one doesn't have social cachet. You yourself say here "notable" - but again, just being notable was not enough, though it was a big help. And of course, if you had the right friends, you could be completely non-notable.

Your post begins with "that's false", but the rest of it agrees with what I said.

In many old Twitter circles, having a bluecheck made you an object of derision for precisely these reasons - it didn't signify authenticity, it was a social marker that frequently came with inane tweets and thin skin that was perceived to arise due to an idea they thought they were "elite."
Sudden boost on robotics world wide
What's causing the seemingly rapid improvement in humanoid robotics all of a sudden? Optimus navigating hills effortlessly despite being blind, four-legged wheeled robots performing Cirque du Soleil-level tricks, and robots in China that look straight out of an Overwatch campaign.
I think the ideal solution in an ideal world would be to do ranked choice voting between the main choices that could be reasonably negotiated and remain. So voters could pick between EEA, Canada-like, remain, etc all at the same time.

Which would annoy the Brexitters that would like to defend vague remain instead of getting into the weeds, or just try to sell their own version of Brexit when it may end up being another version in the end. And the people who oppose voting reform. And I get the feeling the result would be remain wins by being the compromise second preference of a lot of voters.
What's this referring to? Dead people voted for change where?
I get that this this is a way to do it in practical terms, but isn't that just like having to have two passwords for each site (outside the fact that passkeys are a bit more secure than passwords)? I thought one of the main points of passkeys was to reduce admin.
The last few times I've gone to one of these pharmacy stores (Walgreens, Rite Aid, etc) they had the same inventory as my grocery store's pharmacy section but spread out over 20x the area.
The article author skirts around the key true observation here, which is that passkeys were a great idea until cloud vendors waged war on hardware keys.

The concept of a passkey as desired by Yubico was that every user buys a set of hardware keys, uses those instead of passwords, and has no ability to authenticate otherwise.

The concept of a passkey as desired by Apple, Google, and Microsoft is that every user magically authenticates using their OS, and has no ability to authenticate otherwise.

The reason the UX is confusing is because the OS vendors don't want the users using non-OS software or hardware - they want you to use a cloud-hosted passkey instead of using a Discoverable Credential on a Hardware Authenticator, and instead of using a password manager providing its own sync facility. This is shown in the screenshots in the article.

The ideal future state is:

* the provider for newly registered credentials would be a browser setting

* the setting would come configured to use the OS vendor out of the box

* installing a password manager providing passkeys would prompt to change the setting to use the password manager instead

* one of the options in this setting would be "prompt me every time". Approximately nobody would choose that option

* there would never be a prompt for what to use on authenticate() calls, only register(). Authenticate would use whichever valid credential you provided first, whether that's plugging in a token or scanning your thumb to unlock a TPM or whatever

In this world, 99% of people are using OS-vendor-provided cloud-synced passkeys, but technical users get what they want too and everybody has both a secure and an easy experience.

The thing stopping us from getting to that ideal state is that the provider of the FIDO "platform" (the software that lets you choose a key to use) is the OS vendor instead of the browser vendor, and they have a conflict of interest because the OS vendors are also cloud services vendors.
Loading Act limits government use of AI
If the radiology equipment was fully filled that would basically guarantee longer ER wait times
> Also Israel's Jewish population is made up majorly of people not tied to Europe / the Holocaust. Those latter are the minority.

The majority were largely refugees that were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world, so not sure that really changes anything.

> Again, a state built around one ethnicity that by its founding requires people of a separate ethnicity who were equally living in the same land to become stateless, that's wrong and should not happen.

Israel's founding did not require anyone to become stateless. The land was effectively inhabited by two separate groups that did not want to become one state, and rules by the British - then the British gave the UN the task of deciding what to do, and they suggested what everyone else who has ever looked at the problem has suggested, and what any five year old would suggest - split the land into two, and give one to each group. The Jews accepted this split - and the Arabs refused, and started a war to conquer all the area (and let's leave to the imagination what they would've done with the Jewish population in the area).

But, all of that is history at this point. I don't think it matters as much now - Israel exists and has existed for 75 years as a fully reocgnized state. It no more makes sense to talk about "it's wrong for Israel to exist" as to talk about "it's wrong for the US" to exist. Do we routinely look at any other country's founding and talk about them not making sense any more? Many of which were also founded based around ethnicities?

> Now, the Holocaust is nearing 100 years old, does the raison d'etre of the country even apply anymore and does it justify the current state of things which has not changed since then?

Countries don't need a raison d'etre to continue existing.

If by "current state of things" you mean the Palestinians having no state, I don't think anything justifies that. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to change that - multiple attempts have been made at a peace process that gets the Palestinians a sate, which the Palestinians have refused each time. By most surveys or interviews I've seen, most Palestinians do not want peace with Israel - they want Israel gone. And to top it off, the last 15ish years have seen Israel become ever more extreme right, partially driven by the Israeli left's total failure to create a peace with the Palestinians - so it's not like the Israeli side is encouraging peace at this point, in fact quite the opposite.
It may partially be because of vendor lock-in, but I think the real reason is security. For example with Apple's Secure Enclave hardware, you give secret-generation responsibility to this chip, and can never see the value. I use it for SSH private keys, which are meant to be disposable/changeable. As much as I want to own and control all my data, I personally think this is pretty good footgun protection, and I'm ok with being unable to export my passkeys from 1password (and for the record, 1password does not prohibit TOTP exports).
Why would violent crime go up?
The assumption that human behavior and economic system behavior are static is to me the biggest flaw in virtually all of these models that I have seen. It also underlies adjacent panics that arise based on this kind of thinking, like the overpopulation panic. We can see how wrong that was in retrospect, though it may have been right if all behaviors and systems remained static.

I wish the present day underpopulation panic people would get the memo. They are making the exact same errors around mindless extrapolation of present behaviors and trends. Instead of “with these birth rates we will be eating people in 50 years” it’s “with these birth rates we will go extinct!”

There are things to be very concerned about. What happens when you take current behavior and trends and drag it forward on a spreadsheet is not one of them. “If our company continues this growth trajectory we will be worth more than the entire global economy in 25 years!” Every single one of these models and panics is a version of that thinking.

I think a more useful question when faced with such predictions is “how will this not happen?”
Weirdly primitive boats those american yahoos make. Something was lost when Bering Sound was crossed.

This is X0000 year old skill, muchmuch older than Great Pyramids, resulting a boat you can carry with one hand. https://youtu.be/kW7BdhOZZ_c?si=QtQhggwl8QMisOFF
The real work originated with the PolyDye project. TeachingTech isn't a bad channel, but he mostly demonstrates tech invented by other people. I'm not sure I understand the point of commenting a link to his video that is already linked within the first paragraph of the linked article.
“Google says no” is a threat model I’m concerned about, but it doesn’t seem particularly likely, so I’ll pick another passkey manager if it happens.

(If it ever happened, Gmail and Google Photos would be a bigger loss.)
I should clarify that when I say that, I don't mean documentation about the emulator (which is coming along nicely), but documentation about the computers being emulated. I was specifically thinking of things like this ( https://www.pcjs.org/machines/pcx86/compaq/portable/ ) when I was writing that comment.
Apple chooses to ask the user for permission about certain things, but they're not beholden to that "like any other app". No app can e.g use your microphone in the background to listen for trigger words, no other app can analyse your photos for search without a permission dialog, no other app can transmit nearby BSSIDs + GPS location in the background for the purposes of building a location services system. Apple does all these things. Apple is absolutely not doing things "like third party apps do".
Show HN: I built an open-source collection of fancy and useless react components
Hi there, friends!

I built a fun side-project called Fancy Components to explore and recreate some of the more unique, funky, unconventional, and sometimes useless UI designs & microinteractions you might see around the web.

Built (mostly) with React, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, and Motion (formerly Framer Motion).

Just copy the source code into your project, and you’re good to go.

Each component includes examples, demos and also a documentation to help you understand how it works and built.

It’s 100% free and open-source!
Agree about Goldfinger. Moonraker made an awful lot of money.
Surely by that analogy though ChatGPT is AskJeeves or something, not a browser; GPT3/4/o1/o3 or whatever is the browser.
What is the benefit to Apple?
If you believe a thermostat has consciousness, you would also logically believe that the cascading subset of (your body - n*atoms) would also be conscious. E.g. your arm.

This is one reason the topic is so slippery.
Rust's approach is more like a "keep off the grass sign" than a barbed wire fence. If Rust really wasn't meant to be used for these things, it wouldn't have the unsafe keyword at all. But instead of forbidding those things entirely, it just makes them uncomfortable. This nudges the programmer to question if they really need to be on the grass to accomplish their goal, and helps subconsciously steer them onto the safer path.

This is the "strategic use of friction" described here, ironically enough, by the creator of Zig: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3320#issuecomment-8844...
I mean because commonly you shift the problem back to the user's insurance....

If you have 2 hospitals and one takes your insurance and the other doesn't you still get service. If you consolidate to one and they don't take your insurance you may have to drive hours to get medical service.

A huge failure of the system is how health insurance works.